UCP cabinet member under fire for now-deleted tweet quoting Nazi

Clare Clancy

Updated: August 25, 2019

Grant Hunter is sworn in as Associate Minister of Red Tape Reduction during the swearing in of Premier Jason Kenney's government at Government House in Edmonton, on Tuesday, April 30, 2019. Photo by Ian Kucerak/Postmedia ORG XMIT: POS1904301455474177 Ian Kucerak Ian Kucerak / Ian Kucerak/Postmedia

A UCP cabinet member is under fire over a now-deleted tweet that quoted a well-known member of the Nazi party during the Second World War.

Taber-Warner MLA Grant Hunter, who is associate minister of red tape reduction, tweeted Saturday: “Wernher von Braun said, ‘To conquer the universe you’d have to solve two problems: gravity and red tape.’ We’ve made it clear that we are committed to reducing red tape in Alberta. Lots more to come …”

The controversial tweet was deleted but has been re-posted numerous times by critics.

Wernher von Braun was member of the Nazi party and an SS member. He was known for his work on the V-2 ballistic missile, which used slave labour at concentration camps for production. Von Braun later moved to the U.S. and worked for NASA, which describes him as a champion of space exploration.

A 2013 Al Jazeera article, titled ‘history’s most controversial figure?,’ references the slave labour performed at Mittelwork, where more than 60,000 prisoners from the nearby Dora-Mittelbau concentration camp “lived, worked and died in the damp underground tunnels.”

Hunter’s comments followed an op-ed posted online by Global News/CHED which included the quote. Bob Layton, news manager of the Corus Edmonton group of radio stations, wrote the piece titled “the gravity of red tape.”

The article now includes an editor’s note: “This editorial has been updated to remove a quotation which lacked context and clarity. Its inclusion may have unintentionally offended some readers.”

The province referred a media request Sunday morning to Global/CHED/Corus.

“The article was re-posted by the associate minister adding more emphasis on our government’s latest initiative, digital proof of automobile insurance,” said spokesperson Charlotte Taillon, Hunter’s press secretary, in an email. She said it was the “only thing to add on this.”

In 2016, Hunter co-authored a blog post with eight other then-Wildrose MLAs comparing the genocidal Holodomor — in which the Soviet regime’s starvation policies in the 1930s led to the deaths of at least seven million Ukrainians — to the NDP’s carbon tax.

Among those to comment on the Saturday tweet was NDP MLA for Edmonton-South Thomas Dang.

“What is this obsession with Aryans and Nazis that Grant Hunter has?” Dang tweeted. He referenced a 2010 letter Hunter wrote to his local newspaper, the Cardston Temple City Star, where Hunter wrote about the “high number of individuals of substance” living there.

“Perhaps they just came from superior stock, but that thought reeks of ‘Arian’ (sic) undertones,” Hunter wrote in the article.

‘The torture they went through is never forgotten’

Jewish Family Services, meanwhile, held its annual inter-generational picnic Sunday to honour Holocaust survivors in Edmonton.

“It’s 75 years since the war, our seniors are getting older,” said seniors outreach worker Rhonda Eidelman, adding there are more than 100 survivors in the program. “The horror that’s in their minds never goes away, the loss of sleep at night, seeing things on the streets.”

The picnic allows survivors to share their stories with younger generations, she said. “The torture they went through is never forgotten.”

Eidelman, who has extended family members who survived the Holocaust, said the Jewish community continues to face discrimination.

“The people who are carrying these things forward have no idea why they hate Jewish people, and they have no reason to hate Jewish people,” she said.

“We want to carry on the good things … we make sure it never happens again. It should never be that anybody suffers the way these people suffered.”

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